A ransomware attack on Insomniac Games has resulted in the leak of early source code for the second main installment of Marvel’s Spider-Man.
There will be a PC adaptation of the story of Peter Parker and Miles Morales (which may or may not stop the declining sales trend), but that remains to be seen. And some people don’t want to wait. PC_Focus wrote on Twitter that modders have started reverse engineering the code for the PC development version that was leaked in late December. It is already paying off: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 runs at 60fps, but with bugs: the leaked, unfinished version is missing textures and UI elements, and is still full of glitches, but when you think about it, getting good performance even unfinished is an excellent achievement.
Last year we reported that the PC port of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 had doubled in budget (giving Insomniac Games an unprecedented amount of money for such work) and that development would be completed in the current fiscal year. Since the fiscal year starts on April 1 instead of January 1, it’s still the previous fiscal year, and the studio will have the port ready by the end of March, which doesn’t mean Sony will make it available for purchase on Steam and the Epic Games Store sometime in the spring, as they’re holding back the PC version until sales of the PlayStation 5 version drop for business reasons.
Of course, the fan reverse-engineering could still result in Sony and Insomniac Games getting a DMCA claim, so if something becomes publicly playable, they’ll force it to be taken down, otherwise the lawyers will come (we tend to see this from Nintendo, and they usually wait until something makes the news). But a tricky company would embrace the concept and then officially help the developers to release a perfect port that doesn’t need patching…
Source: WCCFTech
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